


How The Light Works (We Know)

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency!
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-21 23:21:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/906149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The neighbors are shouting and Johnny’s eyes are fire on water, smoke on nightblack windows, and Roy doesn’t want him to talk just now, so he lays hands on that electric skin and lets the current ride in his bones, and drags Johnny in for a hard kiss.  It's not the first because the first was softer, something startling, like the first drop of rain when the clouds roll in low.  </p>
<p>Johnny and Roy, the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How The Light Works (We Know)

The neighbors are yelling. It’s late. The city is dark to the bone and all the curtains drawn. The neighbors are yelling, it’s late, and that must be the reason why they are both here, in bed (Johnny’s bed), why Roy’s chest feels tight and why he has laid his fingers on John’s neck and why he has jolted them off like he’s been electrocuted or something. 

No one ever said Johnny wasn’t some kind of live wire.

"Johnny?"

Eyes look different in the dark. Dark eyes. They’re light. Like water. Like rain. Like shining back the fire. 

"You’ve done this before, right pal?"

Johnny swallows hard, audible even over the neighbors (shouting, about him, about her, about them), and his eyebrows shoot up somewhere near his hairline. 

"Uh well yeah, ‘course I have, I mean lotsa times, sure, plenty of times I know exactly what I’m doin’, Roy, why wouldn’t I?"

Johnny is a terrible liar. Even in the dark, all Roy has to do is stare blankly at him, and his high-shouldered bluff falters, and breaks, and he pulls his knees up and gets that moody caught-out-so-what-who-cares look. In the dark. It’s like Roy can just feel like the lines radiating off him. 

Maybe that’s why they’re here in Johnny’s bed under cover of the night and the neighbors yelling. Maybe that’s why Roy is praying that none of those neighbors comes banging on Johnny’s door wailing to be let in that her boyfriend is a no-good-rotten-scoundrel. 

"John?"

"Ok just maybe three, four times." 

"Yeah."

"Really."

"Okay."

"Twice?"

"Yeah."

"…once?" And that small voice gets him _hard_ , in a tight little place just below his navel. It twists. The things he wants grab hold of his brain for just a span of breaths - the eyes, the mouth parting, the curling hair just in front of his ear. 

Roy might actually believe once, but he can hear in that small voice that johnny doesn’t want him to. He nudges him, knuckles to hot skin. Tries not to shiver, tries not to shake.

"Somebody’s gotta know what they’re doing?"

"So why’d you think it has to be me, huh?"

Roy doesn’t have an answer for that. One that won’t get him punched. He doesn’t want that; he doesn’t think Johnny would. He shrugs. 

"I ain’t a queer or anything."

"Yeah."

"I - "

The neighbors are shouting and Johnny’s eyes are fire on water, smoke on nightblack windows, and Roy doesn’t want him to talk just now, so he lays hands on that electric skin and lets the current ride in his bones, and drags Johnny in for a hard kiss. It's not the first because the first was softer, something startling, like the first drop of rain when the clouds roll in low. Look up. Look up, and the lightning cracks over the hills, and before you know it, it's a downpour, it's a deluge.

It's Johnny's mouth against his and the feel of his shifting, twitching, respirating, (whimpering) body. 

Johnny's truck has a mattress in the back and he gets dumped every three, four days at the outside. 

The neighbors are shouting. 

Roy rests his forehead against Johnny's (or Johnny leans into him), trying to remember how he got here, from A to B, from station to house, from two beers to bed, to heavy shadow and the sodium city lights smudging lean (scrawny) shoulders, back, ribs, hills of bone and valleys of skin. To mouth, to mouth, and the neighbors shouting.

Go back. Shut his eyes. Go back. To the part where the flames caught the sky in claws and scratched it, deep and sure, a wildcat shearing the skin and the life from a rabbit. The flames dug in. Called in just about everybody, every man, on the job, on the line, life on the line, and whining sound that won't leave his head is just the steam escaping from damp wood.

But that was yesterday. That was last night. That was this morning, coming home rancid with smoke and sweat. That was a long time ago. The hospital, the black sloughing skin and the red beneath. That was a long time ago. 

It isn't like they haven't seen a building go up like that before. So why's it different.

Why's he here. 

Because the armchair was terrible. Because the beer was good. Because Johnny said to him _you ain't takin' my bed from me_ , but he followed him upstairs anyway. 

Because they were asleep and they woke up. 

He woke up in the dark to the neighbors shouting, surfacing from some elusive dream-place, something about heat that licked your bones raw and sawtooth flames carving a home into a skeleton of rebar and stone. He woke up and he saw Johnny on his back the same way he sleeps at the station, his chest rising and falling, rising and falling. 

It wasn't like he meant to lay his hand there, at the dip just below his sternum, it wasn't like he lingered there on purpose. 

Johnny woke up and here they are. Johnny's eyes dark and heavy.

"I ain't a queer," he says, and his lips are wet and glisten in the slants of the streetlight outside, where the neighbors are shouting and the sirens are distant and somewhere someone's home is on fire and someone is dying, and it's not their job, not right now. 

"I know that," Roy says. 

Johnny's eyebrows come together and his mouth goes into a line. "Good. 'Cause I'm not."

"Didn't say you were."

"Just 'cause I know who I like."

"Yeah."

"People, you know, when they know who they like, people shouldn't go around calling them names for that, 'cause you got to know who you like, it doesn't mean you're a sissy or anything like I don't like - like - "

Everything is different and nothing changed at all, Johnny's eyes bright and searching in the dark, hey, back me up here, hey, listen to me, hey, we're partners, hey - 

"Johnny."

"Huh."

Roy takes a breath but he doesn't know what to say, and looking at Johnny with the sheet at his hip and his body thin and living and vulnerable in the shadows in bed is not unlike looking at Johnny on a gurney, or Johnny still and semi-conscious and wheezing on the ground, a drizzle of hosewater misting all around them. The roles reversed. The paramedic the patient. Whichever of them on the ground and looking up, kneeling and looking down. 

One night a shard of glass cut him high on his cheek, and the blood smeared down Johnny's sleeve, and stayed there, a dark bolt on the dirty canvas. 

He wants to say, what do you _want,_ but the part of him that knows Johnny like his own voice knows John will just panic and stammer and stall.

And that's the last thing that _he_ wants.

So he says, instead, with his hand tentative on Johnny's hip (and here he jerks, trembles slightly, and Roy wonders is he like this with women, does he shake and bite his lip and stare like it's a foreign language, like he's been dropped behind enemy lines) - 

"C'mere pal."

Johnny looks relieved. His brows relax. He almost smiles. He lies down alongside Roy and they are close as shadows to each other. Who cares about the neighbors. Johnny's hair is black and shaggy and falls down over his eyes and he looks like mischief, and he almost looks beautiful, in some weird way, the way a leaf does when it curls up in flames. 

They start kissing again because kissing is easy, familiar ground, solid ground, but Roy's spine feels like lightning and his belly feels like a heat-shimmer, John all pressed up against him, pressing closer, pulling closer. 

John's mouth slides off his somewhere along the line but smooth, slipping down his chin and jaw to his shoulder, and Roy groans deep when Johnny just kind of - mouths at him, making noises of his own, and through his slipping eyes he sees the twist of muscle in Johnny's back and he runs his fingers over the planes and lines. He could name them all. He has. He has held this body when it was injured and just a body, an assortment of parts with names and operations, a collective thing that was not his friend, was not his partner. 

Was not Johnny pressed against him. Mouthing. Murmuring into his shoulder, his neck. 

"Come _here_ ," Roy grunts, seethes a little, rolling onto his back and dragging Johnny on top of him, and Johnny looks down at him with a dazed expression. Roy's hard and he shouldn't be and he doesn't care, _shouldn't be_ stopped making sense about the same time him and three beers crawled into Johnny's bed and Johnny told him not to steal the damn covers. 

_Shouldn't be_ stopped somewhere around the first time they had a victim die on them, at scene, an accident victim with an unlucky laceration, nothing they could do, just gone, slipped out on them like a girl at a party not even a see-you-round. 

"Hey Roy," Johnny says, a stupid, goofy little smile playing on his face. It lights up his eyes. Roy reaches up to brush his hair back and winds up poking him in the eye and Johnny sort of falls on his chest giggling, and it doesn't come anywhere near killing his arousal it just makes it _worse_ , or better, Johnny laughing and rubbing against him. "Hey, Roy, you could've fucking died." 

That was yesterday. That was a long time ago. 

Shut up, Johnny.

I'm not dead, Johnny.

Quit being stupid, if you can.

"Jesus, Johnny."

"Hey, Roy."

"Yeah?"

"I'm definitely not a queer."

"I got that." 

Johnny's erection is pressing against his belly. Every little breath is sending twinges to his groin. 

"I mean I like you. I do. I like you a whole lot I'm just reassuring you of the fact that I am not a queer."

Johnny is a chatty drunk. 

Or that haze on his face is arousal, and the hiccup in his voice is fear, like he thinks that Roy is going to throw him out of his _own bed_ , which Roy wouldn't do because that's just a rude thing to do and besides, Johnny is really kind of beautiful, and Roy wants him to stay (here, like this, here, in bed) for as long as possible and Roy isn't drunk anymore, he is stone cold sober as a cup of coffee.

"Johnny," he says, steady as he can, Johnny on top of him after all, "Johnny, _shut up._ "

He punctuates that with thrusting his hips up, which sends his brain into some sort of spiral and pulls a plaintive noise from Johnny's throat. 

So he does it again. 

Just for the noise. 

Johnny presses close to him, heaves against him and Roy puts his hands on his smooth back to feel the muscles play, digs his fingers in, deep, deeper, and they grind against each other like a couple of teenagers and Johnny mutters things into his lips and face and forehead and chest like _fuck_ and _ohmygod_ and _please, please, please -_

No that's him, no, that's him, one hand in Johnny's hair and one hand on the small of his back saying, "Please please oh god please - " 

He hasn't come in his shorts since he was a teenager. 

He doesn't know about Johnny. He knows a lot about Johnny's love life. Mostly about his rotten luck with women. 

He should've known Johnny wouldn't shut up. He should've known he wouldn't care. That he'd love it. That he'd want it. 

He didn't know about the way Johnny smiles, sated, sliding half off him, skin hot, sheened in sweat like he's run a race, like he's just stumbled out of a burning building. The satisfaction in his eyes. 

Roy kisses him. His face. His hair tickles. 

"Hey," Johnny says.

"Hey, yourself."

"I - "

"Don't say it."

"Wasn't gonna."

"Say what, then?"

"Was it alright? For you?"

Johnny looks at him like that sometimes after a hard run. Did we do alright, Roy? Did we do anything? What we did, did it matter?

"Yeah," he says. Feeling heavy, feeling tired. Johnny is tangled around him, now he's the one on his back. 

"Okay."

"You?"

Johnny murmurs an assent, face against Roy's cheek. Roy can feel his breathing, steady. Steady and even. 

The neighbors have stopped shouting, and there's a low, warm breeze coming in the window and rustling the blinds and making the light and shadows dance. Late. Late going on early. The city in its sprawling slumber just beginning to make its slow and lumbering twist toward dawn.


End file.
